Sig Christenson is a veteran military reporter who has made nine trips to the war zone. He writes regularly for Hearst about service members, veterans and heroes, among other topics. He is also the co-founder and former president of Military Reporters and Editors, founded in 2002.

Fliers

07/31/2013

Two Air Force pilots escaped injury this week when their T-38 Talon jet belly landed at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph.

Details about the incident were unclear, but the 12th Flying Training Wing said in a brief statement that the twin-engine, supersonic aircraft touched down without its landing gear on the base's east runway.

The Air Force did not say if the accident was believed to have been triggered by mechanical failure of some kind or possibly human error, but a 12th Flying Training Wing spokeswoman, Bekah Clark, said the pilot in command of the jet declared an in-flight emergency. The pilots were not identified.

The incident occurred at 10:30 a.m. Monday, but the wing did not send a release to media outlets advising than an accident had occurred, a routine practice of military public affairs offices.

A notice about the crash was initially posted on the wing's website at 11:10 a.m. Monday and updated Tuesday morning.

The Randolph-based aircraft didn't carry dummy bombs and cannot dump fuel. After it landed, it slid down the runway, but Clark didn't say how far it went before stopping. First-responders were called to the scene after the plane landed, but no water or foam was used, she said.

Damage was still being determined. Flying operations resumed Tuesday on the east runway, one of two at Randolph.

The accident is the first at Randolph in 10 years. In that crash, a T-38 with two instructor pilots went down March 19, 2003 while making a touch-and-go landing after the right tire gave way. The left tire then collapsed as the pilot tried to control the plane.

08/24/2012

Second Lt. Samuel Smith knew what he was up against when his B-17 bomber group got orders to strike a German base that was home to 16 of the war's newest planes, the Messerschmitt Me-262 — the first jet-powered aircraft to be used in combat.

“On the mission before this we went to Hamburg and there must have been 15 of them in the air, and I must have seen 10 or 15 bombers go down,” he said.

A few weeks shy of 88, Smith was honored Friday for his heroics on the mission that took them Hopsten on March 21, 1945. He received a Distinguished Flying Cross at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph's Taj Mahal, a crowd of more than 80 people giving a long standing ovation.

“He's a representative of a generation of Americans that did something special,” said Gen. Edward A. Rice Jr., head of the Air Education and Training Command and himself a bomber pilot. “We were talking about the thousand-plane raids that will probably never again be replicated.”

The medal, which falls between the Bronze Star and Silver Star, was given decades late because a commander during World War II refused to sign off on them.

Long after the war, at a reunion, the commander admitted he was wrong, apologized and helped Smith get the medal.

Still, it was a bittersweet day. Only three of Smith's eight crewmen and a few pilot buddies still are alive. Still sharp, he's the only member of the crew who is mobile.

“Here it is 60, 70 years later and finally the award is being made,” said Smith, a Kerrville petrochemical plant consultant. “It's a great thing to me, but in lots of respects it's kind of sad because the guys who flew with me and helped are not here.”

07/12/2012

The mission Philip Bryant and Joshua Hallada flew in their Air Force helicopters out of Bagram Air Field was a familiar routine for best friends.

They had done that for two months in Afghanistan as they flew search-and-rescue missions.

But they've long done everything together — first playing as children, later studying at the Air Force Academy, serving in Asia and finally going to war.

Yet they probably never imagined receiving the Silver Star, the nation's third-highest award for gallantry in combat, in an Air Force hangar Thursday, before family and friends.

Sitting together afterward, they talked of the battle they fought on April 23, 2011, as if it were just another day.

“We knew it was happening, and we trained so much for this that I'd say I was a little nervous, but it was just reacting. We were just doing what we were trained to do,” Bryant said after receiving the medals at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph. “We weren't real nervous, but we were very spun up, excited with what was going on.”

An Army helicopter had gone down 20 miles outside of Bagram, its two pilots pinned down by enemy fire. Hallada, pilot of Pedro 83, led the two-ship formation, with Bryant his wingman. Each had four crewmembers and two rescue team members on their ships, and they were ordered to save the downed soldiers.

That was their job. As HH-60G Pavehawk search-and-rescue pilots leading the Air Force's fabled “PJs,” or pararescue teams, they lived the code the organization shares: “These things I do, that others may live.”

They couldn't say how many insurgents were burrowed into the mountainside, but after arriving in the Alasay Valley, Bryant's aircraft, Pedro 84, took fire.

There was more bad news. One of the Army pilots, Iowa Army National Guard Staff Sgt. James Justice, 32, was unconscious.

He later died.

An Air Force account of the battle, coupled with Hallada's Silver Star citation, tells the story.